Oscars Special: For Your Consideration …

Published on Thursday 19 February 2009 10:30

SINCE THIS YEAR'S OSCAR NOMInations were announced, dedicated fans of The Dark Knight have been attempting to whip up a grassroots campaign to boycott the broadcast of tomorrow's ceremony.

The film has eight nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actor for the late Heath Ledger, but their beef is based on the lack of nominations in the major categories, specifically Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

It's doubtful the pr oducers of the Oscar show are quaking in their boots, however. Go online and you'll see the campaign has little traction and, since fanboys aren't exactly the core demographic for the ceremony's dwindling audience, the all-important advertisers had probably already discounted them from their calculations.

Still, it's hard not to share their grievance. In a year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has seen fit to honour a film about an illiterate Nazi prison guard, a film about a creepy, reverse-ageing Forrest Gump wannabe, and a story about the host of Through the Keyhole, it's hard to justify leaving out a film just because it features a guy who fights crime dressed as a bat. Alas, that is exactly what has happened. Despite getting better reviews than most of this year's Best Picture contenders, despite earning more than a billion dollars worldwide (as Titanic proved, money talks, come Oscar time time), The Dark Knight seems to have been hampered by its status as a superhero film. That was probably to be expected, but it doesn't make it all right.

It sends out a worrying signal that only certain kinds of films are deemed worthy enough to win Oscars – and since the awards buzz surrounding a film can add millions to its box office, more and more so-called "prestige pictures" are pandering to established trends, with this year's crop of contenders especially guilty of Oscar-baiting.

Take The Reader, which is nominated for five awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director. Here's a film adapted from a well-regarded middlebrow novel (always a good start) about a serious and provocative subject (German guilt and complicity over the Holocaust) that has been tastefully presented in the safest way possible (don't want to risk offending anyone) by a well-regarded middle-brow film-maker (Stephen Daldry, director of the similarly awards-friendly The Hours) and featuring a perennial Academy Award nominee (Kate Winslet) who gets to demonstrate her bravery by playing an unsympathetic character (a Nazi) who is grappling with a disability (she can't read) and who also takes her clothes off a lot (hey, she has to sleep with a schoolboy – see, it is risqu) and who we follow through to old age (cue Awards-friendly make-up job). The film practically has "For Your Consideration" rubber-stamped on every frame. No wonder Winslet has been trying to distance herself from her appearance on Extras a few years ago – when she sent up her desperation to win a statuette by starring in a Holocaust movie because – gulp – "you're guaranteed an Oscar".

Not that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is any less shameless. David Fincher's bloated epic is a technical wonder for which it deserves some of its 13 Oscar nominations. But Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for a film that says nothing profound about the human condition over the course of three hours? Please. That shows how willing Academy voters are to be duped by a tricksy and empty premise as long as it is dressed up prettily enough.

Frost/Nixon, too, is an unworthy candidate for Best Picture and Best Director. Frank Langella's Oscar-nominated performance as Richard Nixon aside, it's little more than a puffed-up TV movie, nominated once again for the illusion of quality its subject matter represents.

The same goes for Milk. Though it's a better film than any of the above, it's another by-the-numbers biopic and a frustrating concession to mainstream sensibilities by Gus Van Sant, who has ditched his recent bold storytelling experiments of Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park to run through the flashpoint moments of slain gay politician Harvey Milk, building the film around Sean Penn's transformative (read: smiling) performance.

Only Slumdog Millionaire, despite conforming to the Academy-favoured underdog story arc, seems to have landed on the Best Picture list on its own merits. That's not to say there hasn't been a well-orchestrated campaign to get it on the list since it started picking up momentum on the festival circuit last year. But it is the only Best Picture nominee that doesn't feel as if it was made with at least one eye on the Oscars.

And that's more than you can say for Doubt, which, with its ludicrously austere tone and Meryl Streep's Mother Superior schtick, actually plays more like a parody of a self-serious Oscar chaser – something it's clear no voting member noticed, since it has landed five major nominations for acting and writing. Or how about Changeling, which actually gave a shout-out to the awards by having Angelina Jolie (subsequently nominated) smile quietly to herself as her character listens to an old radio broadcast of the ceremony announcing the 1935 Best Actress winner? Then there are all the Oscar-hopefuls – Revolutionary Road, Defiance – whose mediocrity got edged out by all the other mediocrity released in time for the shortlist. It's been a depressing few months to be a moviegoer.

Pitching for Oscars is nothing new. Its 81-year history is littered with forgotten films once deemed important. As AO Scott of the New York Times said recently, that's because "the Oscars are an odd phenomenon, because what they're really about is not the best movies of a given year, but the American film industry's image of itself". In other words, Hollywood often favours drearily accessible, well-crafted films about serious subject matters because it shows they care about more than just making money. Basically, it allows Hollywood to pretend they care about art without risking alienating audiences with something too challenging.

It's not always this way. Very occasionally there's a banner year like last year when vital, astonishing films such as There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men took home the lion's share of the nominations. By comparison, the last year in cinema has been devoid of such risk-taking films, yet rather than cast its net wider to embrace a politically aware, genre-redefining blockbuster such as The Dark Knight, or even bumping the groundbreaking Wall-E up from the animation into the Best Picture category, the Academy has persisted in rewarding the films it thinks will make it look serious, regardless of the fact that the cinematic achievements of those movies are decades behind The Dark Knight and Wall-E.

Here's another way to think of it: going by the Academy's recent record, if the groundbreaking, proto-blockbusters of the early 1970s – say, The French Connection (a cop movie), or The Godfather (gangsters), or The Exorcist (horror) were released today they probably wouldn't get nominated. Now, tell me the Oscars mean something.

What our critic said about...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

"It's a bizarre folly: a technically accomplished but mechanical weepy that showcases the astonishing capability digital cinema now has to turn back the clock for actors – and the way tedious films repeatedly have a habit of making time seem as if it is no longer moving forward."

Changeling

"Clint Eastwood's rather baffling reputation as America's most respected director is likely to continue with Changeling, a stately and stilted period melodrama that seems to be gunning so hard for Academy Award nominations that it even gives a shameless shout-out to the Oscars in its final moments."

Doubt

"The kind of film that if you didn't know any better you'd swear was a satirical sideswipe at the blatant Oscar-chasing practices of Hollywood, the kind of overly serious, ridiculously severe and humourless film expertly parodied in the opening scenes of Tropic Thunder with the fake trailer for gay monk movie Satan's Alley … It borders on camp and features an array of top thesps chewing scenery like there's no tomorrow."

The Reader

"This is the kind of faux-highbrow picture with a literary pedigree that seems to exist for no other reason than to win awards. In its own way, it's as calculated and results-oriented as a box-office-obsessed summer blockbuster."

ALISTAIR HARKNESS